I built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Knowledge Management Program for its contact center. I managed CFPB’s inventory of 1795 articles, which have been collectively viewed over 10 million times since being fielded in Salesforce in 2017.
This resource helps the agents file consumer complaints and respond to consumer callers with up-to-date information about consumer protection for financial services.
At CFPB, I also led the contact center’s first content governance initiative for knowledge management.
CHALLENGE
When I joined CFPB in 2016, it was at the start of converting its CRM and Knowledge Base from an Oracle platform to the Salesforce CRM. The KM inventory was hefty with PDF formats, and job aids lacked a consistent template. In addition, product information for financial services was bloated, disconnected from the website version, and struggled to keep pace with content changes. Without SME’s integrated into content team operations, it was a struggle to keep our assets factual and up-to-date. Managers were also in the dark, lacking data to guide their decision-making. Institutional knowledge about how we did our job was never codified in standard operating procedures. The time was ripe to reinvent the Knowledge Management program top to bottom.
RESULTS
My multi-year effort at the helm of this task resulted in the reinvention of all KM systems and procedures. I marshalled a raft of best practices into practice, putting my strategy in place to:
- Lead content strategy and lifecycle content management and operations for our inventory of English and Spanish KB articles. I coordinated a team of four content managers who cycle through maintenance, updates, and additions, amounting to over 1,000 touchpoints annually. I also managed a shift in content strategy to be future-ready for OmniChannel and chat by mapping over 500 knowledge base assets to public-facing versions.
- Adopt new standard operating procedures and automated workflow for publishing, and a chartered community of practice that meets monthly to enhance collaboration.
- Recruit content stewards to serve as Subject Matter Experts for all procedural documents. We have institutionalized this new role at the organization, modeling industry best practices with clear roles and responsibilities for contract teams and SMEs.
- Optimize digital content by transitioning from a print orientation. We transformed most PDF files into HTML versions and established strict rules for what should remain in PDF format. We use consistent templates for article types to promote trust, plain language, and support both usability and readability. With business intelligence tools in place to track and manage our backlog, we have adopted authoritative version control.
- Deliver robust program assessments. These included a “State of Mosaic Knowledge” benchmarking report, utilizing a knowledge maturity model framework, scorecard quality audits, usability testing through structured interviews, and system usability score surveys.
AWARDS
In 2022, the Director’s Mission Achievement Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement to the CFPB mission of protecting consumers, went to workers in the section that includes the KM program. The Stakeholder Services section, home to the contact center’s knowledge management program, was honored for managing the bureau’s complaint handling system during the pandemic — a period of record-high consumer complaints.